Thom Yorke on Beats 1

Thom Yorke sits down with Zane Lowe in Los Angeles, at the end of the Tomorrow's Modern Boxes North American leg, two days before ANIMA comes out. He opens on no sleep after three shows at the Hollywood Bowl and on Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep, then on how he learned to give interviews: he used to answer honestly, hated how it read in print, and found that hiding did not work either. He says the part of himself he was afraid to show, which he found around The Bends, is the part people connect with. Lowe says "Dawn Chorus" made him cry in the car; Yorke says he looked for the coldest sound he could, sang essentially one note, and wrote the words in one pass.

A Radiohead song, he says, used to start with him mumbling over a handful of chords and sending them round, and only when the others found something did he feel free to pick up the microphone. Making music is like a child playing with Lego. He remembers the last Radiohead tour, its nights at Madison Square Garden with 75 to 80 percent of each set different, as one of his best musical experiences, and says most of ANIMA grew out of his own Tomorrow's Modern Boxes shows, cutting up old material with Nigel Godrich. Suspiria, his score for the horror film, was, he says with some irony, his writer's block, and a relief: a chance to make noise instead of writing songs. Jonny Greenwood's advice for working with film people was to do a lot yourself and walk away if they do not like it. The worst block was after OK Computer, when he felt himself shrinking in ever bigger rooms. The title comes from Jung and from Jaron Lanier's idea that we copy what our devices say about us; that is why Boris Johnson can lie and the consequences do not feel real. He calls British and American politics a Punch and Judy show, and ends with Extinction Rebellion and his children, who tell him it is his generation's fault.